Re: Computational Historical Linguistics

From: Mark Odegard
Message: 1977
Date: 2000-03-30

The topic has been talked to death elsewhere. What has to be understood (so far as I understand it) is that Don Ringe et al's work is producing ROOTLESS trees. When they proclaim Old English's location on this tree, they are being somewhat tongue-in-cheek: they are reporting what their computer runs turn out.
 
Essentially, all they are saying is that OE (which is NOT a satem language) is nonetheless best placed inside the group which did undergo satemization. The literature I've read says there are incompletely explained peculiarities in Germanic which largely disappear if you posit a strong genetic (but pre-satemic) relationship with the B-S and I-I branches.
 
Much of what they are doing seems to be 'tinkering'. They are attempting to find those linguistic features which can accurately predict known relationships, and then apply the same methodology to unknown relationships. One can only wish them success.
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Gregory L. Eyink
To: cybalist@eGroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 4:11 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Computational Historical Linguistics

this is a comment, concerning the work of the Computational Historical Linguistics Project at University of Pennsylvania (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~histling/home.html. Perhaps I am just a grouchy physicist, but I don't see any value in what they have done